DUST - WIP - Sketches and Procreate Timelapse

Hi everyone, 

Here's another Work In Progress post of a new painting!

I am working on 3 painting concepts currently, the first of which you saw a bit of in my last post, and the third of which I will upload a full post of tomorrow. 

This post is for the 2nd piece, Dust (name tbc). 

This painting is based on this 2018 Inktober drawing : 

I started exploring it further with the aim of turning it into a painting not too long after, maybe in the beginning of 2019, but it never got further than the sketches below : 

Some of you may recall those sketches, as I submitted them to patrons as a poll back then, to decide on the hand positions of the characters. 

Something still felt like it was missing back then though, so I didn't end up working on it any further, preferring to let it mature in my mind for a while. 

I decided to pick it back up recently, as it has been one of my favourite concepts for a while, and I feel like I am in a good place to explore it again. 

I started with messy doodles, to try and find both a good composition and background, and a good pose for the characters to be in. 

The sketches on the left above were rough explorations of the characters' interaction. I initially decided to have them kneeling in front of each other, naked in the middle of a desolate sand desert. 

However, there was something too bleak about that context. While this concept is rather tragic in its theme, I still like for my pieces to have some measure of hope and warmth to them. I particularly wanted the characters' relationship to not be antagonistic or for one to seem too much like the victim of the other. This piece is about intimacy most of all, with all the vulnerability and fragility that comes with that, and all the contradictions and dichotomies that can accompany being close to another person, so I want my characters' relationship to not be too obviously unbalanced or skewed. 

I also wanted a little more detail to the background, more life and narrative. 

The sketch on the right above was the direction I initially took after discarding the desert idea ; the characters are now set in the ruins of a small house, which in my mind would be set in a forest. (The volcanic rock note pertains to another idea for a different concept)

This was the composition I then settled more firmly on, and I stared looking for references and writing down notes with the intention to start the sketch in earnest. 

This didn't last however, and as I took a few days to think about it, I realised that I wanted the focus on the piece to be on the blowing away of the face. Such a detailed and zoomed out composition might take away from that crucial interaction. I needed the piece to focus more closely on the characters, and for the background to be more intimate. 

So back to the drawing board I went. 

An element of the ruined house that I liked was the idea of the person being blown away through a destroyed window, so I took that and expanded on it. 

I finally settled on having the context be an open window giving onto a starry night sky, with one character sitting on the window ledge and being gently blown away by the other character standing in front of them.

I took the process to my iPad this time, and photobashed some images together to get a rough idea of the general composition. 

I drew a few character poses to get a feel of the scale and dynamism, and once I felt like I was going somewhere I liked, I picked up my pencil again and gave sketching them out properly a go. 

This pose proved quite tricky to explore, and a few issues started to arise. 

For one, I usually draw my characters naked, but in this instance, this was lending the pose something a little too sexual for my liking, which was taking away from the intended focus.
I care little for the physicality of the bodies I draw, and I always only really intend them to be metaphorical representations of the mind rather than literal representation of human beings, if that makes sense.
So while I have nothing against sexual imagery in art, I feel it is the kind of topic that becomes the center of focus in a piece, and that it not my intention here. 

Secondly, I found it difficult to find a pose that didn't make it look like one character had a lot of power over the other. This is already implicit in the blowing away action, and I don't want that further emphasized by their body positions. Or at least, not too much. 

So as you can see above, I experimented with a bunch of leg poses, hand poses and body positions to try and find something that sat right with me.
Once the above sketch became too messy, I copied the main elements I liked from it onto a new page using my lightboard and continued the process. 

At this point, things were starting to feel stiff and awkward as I had redrawn the same thing a few too many times in a row and was starting to tire, so I switched back to working digitally for a while. 

I took a picture of the sketch so far with my iPad and experimented with clothing and hand poses. 

I also took a number of reference pictures of myself to visualise some options, so most of the face angles and hands positions are modeled on myself. 

Once I felt a little more confident about where this was going and had a few options in mind for clothing, I went back to my sketchbook and set out to sketch the final character image.

I drew out the part of the composition I was satisfied with, and then repeated the picture-iPad process once again when I got to a point in the sketching process where it was more efficient to work digitally than it would be to repeat the same drawing over and over.

This time, I worked on figuring out what pose to go for for the last hand, using images of my own hands inserted into the sketch to get a better idea of each option.  

After a little while of trying out various poses as well as researching clothing options and references, I settled on the final hand poses, a potential hairstyle, and oversized shirts for the clothing. 

I then finally managed to complete a rough final sketch, which you can see below. 

I took it into Photoshop one last time to resize the hands a little, as well as print it to fit the format of the paper I want to paint on, and my next step will be to transfer it to the final watercolour paper, and sketch out the background. 

There are still some kinks I want to iron out with the background itself, as I am still a little unsure about some of the details, but I am on track to get this started soon!

I will keep you updated as I keep going of course!

I hope you enjoyed this little run down of my process so far.  If you have any questions, do leave me a comment and I'll get back to you :)

I hope you are all well,  
See you tomorrow for painting 3, as well as an update on painting 1. ;)

All the best,

M